In color management, an International Color Consortium (ICC) profile is a set of data that characterizes a color input or output device, or a color space, according to standards promulgated by the ICC. Profiles describe the color attributes of a particular device or viewing requirement by defining a mapping between the device source or target color space and a profile connection space (PCS). This PCS can be a CIELAB (LAB) color space or a CIEXYZ (XYZ) color space. Mappings can be specified using tables, to which interpolation is applied, or through a series of parameters for transformations. A device that captures or displays color can have its own ICC profile. Some manufacturers provide profiles for their products, and there are several products that allow end users to generate and/or modify the ICC profile for a given device, for example by employing a tristimulus colorimeter or a spectrophotometer.
A LAB color space is a color-opponent space with dimension L for lightness and A and B for the color-opponent dimensions, based on nonlinearly compressed CIE XYZ color space coordinates. LAB color space is designed to approximate human vision. Since LAB color space is much larger than the gamut of computer displays, printers, or even human vision, a bitmap image represented as the LAB requires more data per pixel to obtain the same precision as a red, blue green (RGB) or cyan, magenta, yellow, black (CMYK) bitmap. In a XYZ color space, tristimulus values called X, Y, and Z, which are roughly red, green and blue, respectively.